Full Description
The insight that institutions, and the communicative practices that create, sustain, and challenge them, are multimodal accomplishments has garnered increasing attention from scholars in organization and management research over the last decade. Traditional understanding of social knowledge and meaning as being constituted primarily through verbal discourse has been challenged and extended by work that has promoted the centrality of visual, material, and other sign systems (e.g., audio, gestures, layout) for constructing social reality.
While some discursive approaches to organizations and institutions have acknowledged the existence and relevance of modes other than the verbal for some time, systematic research on multimodality has remained rather sparse. In particular, the interaction and orchestration of multiple modes remains terra incognita with considerable empirical, methodological, and theoretical stakes.
Together, 54A and 54B of Research in the Sociology of Organizations investigate these issues with innovative research that focuses on the relationship between different modes in the emergence, diffusion, maintenance, and challenge of social meanings and institutions. Individual contributions demonstrate the potential of multimodal approaches to rejuvenate and extend the study of institutions, they revisit research on classic phenomena in organization theory through a multimodal lens, and advance the design of relevant and rigorous methods of analysis for the study of multimodal communicative practices.
Contents
Part One: Multimodal Perspectives On Institutional Persistence and Change
1, Multimodal Construction of a Rational Myth: Industrialization of The French Building Sector in The Period from 1945 To 1970; Eva Boxenbaum, Thibault Daudigeos, Jean-Charles Pillet and Sylvain Colombero
2, Cru, Glue, and Status: How Wine Labels Helped Ennoble Bordeaux; Grégoire Croidieu, Birthe Soppe and Walter W. Powell
3, Where History, Visuality and Identity Meet: Institutional Paths to Visual Diversity Among Organizations; Achim Oberg, Gili S. Drori and Giuseppe Delmestri
4, Dirty Oil or Ethical Oil? Visual Rhetoric in Legitimation Struggles; Lianne M. Lefsrud, Heather Graves and Nelson Phillips
Part Two: The Multimodal Construction of Identities
5, Companies On the Runway: Fashion Companies' Multimodal Presentation of Their Organizational Identity in Job Advertisements; Bernadette Bullinger
6, Message in A Bottle: Multiple Modes and Multiple Media in Market Identity Claims; Bernard Forgues and Tristan May
7, The Architecture of City Identities: A Multimodal Study of Barcelona and Boston; Candace Jones and Silviya Svejenova
Afterword: Multimodality in Organization Studies; Theo Van Leeuwen
